Born at Duntiblæ, a small village on the Luggie, some eight miles from Glasgow. The son of a weaver, he began to write verses when a boy, and through the influence of Sydney Dobell, with whom he had carried on some correspondence, visited London in 1860, where he was introduced to Lord Houghton. Some months later, signs of consumption having showed themselves, he persistently refused to avail himself of the medical treatment tendered by his London friends, and returned home, where he shortly afterwards died. Through the influence of Lord Houghton, arrangements had been completed for the publication of his descriptive poem “The Luggie;” but Gray did not live to see it printed. It was published in 1862, under the title of “The Luggie and Other Poems,” and includes “In the Shadows,” a series of sonnets written during his closing days.

Personal

	THIS MONUMENT OF
	AFFECTION, ADMIRATION, AND REGRET,
	IS ERECTED TO
	DAVID GRAY,
	THE POET OF MERKLAND,
	BY FRIENDS FROM FAR AND NEAR,
	DESIROUS THAT HIS GRAVE SHOULD BE REMEMBERED
	AMID THE SCENES OF HIS RARE GENIUS
	AND EARLY DEATH,
	AND BY THE LUGGIE, NOW NUMBERED WITH THE
	STREAMS ILLUSTRIOUS IN SCOTTISH SONG.
	BORN, 29TH JANUARY, 1838; DIED, 3RD DECEMBER, 1861.

  I am in London and dare not look into the middle of next week. What brought me here? God knows, for I don’t. Alone in such a place is a horrible thing. I have seen Dr. Mackay, but it’s all up. People don’t seem to understand me…. Westminster Abbey! I was there all day yesterday. If I live I shall be buried there—so help me God! A completely defined consciousness of great poetical genius is my only antidote against utter despair and despicable failure.

	Below lies one whose name was traced in sand.
	He died, not knowing what it was to live:
	Died, while the first sweet consciousness of manhood
	And maiden thought electrified his soul,
	Faint beatings in the calyx of the rose.
	Bewildered reader! pass without a sigh,
	In a proud sorrow! There is life with God,
	In other kingdom of a sweeter air;
	In Eden every flower is blown: Amen.

	’Tis near a year since Andrew went to sleep—
	A winter and a summer. Yonder bed
	Is where the boy was born, and where he died,
	And yonder o’er the lowland is his grave:
	The nook of grass and gowans where in thought
	I found you standing at the set o’ sun….
	The Lord content us—’tis a weary world.
	*        *        *        *        *
	… And you think weel of Andrews’ book? You think
	That folk will love him, for the poetry’s sake,
	Many a year to come? We take it kind,
	You speak so weel of Andrew!

	Foam-flecks of day on murmuring streams of life,
	Gloom woven thick with mist of silky white,
	Rare sounds of joy in waves of pain, a strife
	Subdued, a storm made beautiful with light!
	“Ah, nay!” thou sayest, weary of his wound!
	“These are but echoes of a fight still on,
	Wailed accents hiding in a worried sound,—
	The lustre of a day forever gone.”
	Perhaps. Yet he believed the stars within the night
	Were pale with dawn; and he must sing his way to light.

  Days passed, weeks passed, months passed, and he knew that he could not live. He was ready to die, his life had been such a failure; but he was not willing to die until he was sure his poems would be published. He worked over them, he copied them, he wrote to his friends about them—wrote so earnestly, so yearningly, so sadly, that they raised money enough to publish them, Lord Houghton subscribing five pounds, and Mr. Dobell and other friends other sums. So they were placed in the hands of the printer, and a specimen page that began “How beautiful!” was sent to him. It reached him on December 2, 1861. When he saw it, his face lighted up, and the fame for which he had struggled was won. “It is good news,” he said. The next day he died, his last words being, “God has love, and I have faith!”

General

	Oh, rare young soul! Thou wast of such a mould
	As could not bear the poet’s painful dower!
	Hence, in the sweet spring-tide of opening power,
	Ere yet the gathering breeze of song had roll’d
	Out on the world its music manifold,
	Death gently hushed the harp, lest storm or shower—
	Which surely life had brought some later hour—
	Should snap the quivering strings or dim their gold;
	Yet not the less shall tender memories dwell
	In those sweet notes—and sad as sweet they seem—
	Which from the burning touch of boyhood fell;
	For long as little Luggie winds her stream,
	And the twin Bothlin prattles down the dell,
	Thither shall many a pilgrim turn and dream!

  I would recommend the readers of these Poems to keep in mind how deeply they are based on the few phenomena of nature that came within the Poet’s observation. He revels in the frost and snow until the winter of his own sorrow and sickness becomes too hard for him to bear, and then he only asks for

“One clear day, a snowdrop, and sweet air.”

The lost illusion of the cuckoo, when it was transformed into

“A slender bird of modest brown,”

is missed, as something he cannot afford to spare in his scanty store of natural delights. The “Luggie” itself ever remains the simple stream that it really is, and is not decked-out in any fantastic or inharmonious coloring.

  David Gray’s poetical susceptibility was of the most conspicuous description. He had a most refined perception of the beautiful; he had a perception of an interminable vista of beauty and truth. He had noble and pure thoughts, and he had been enabled to express those noble and pure thoughts in very noble and pure language. “The Luggie” is a most remarkable poem, containing many very fine passages, inspired partially, no doubt, by a careful perusal of Thomson’s “Seasons” and Wordsworth’s “Excursion,” and not, therefore, so entirely original as some of the author’s subsequent poems; but with passages breaking out in it every now and then which neither Thomson nor Wordsworth suggested, and which are entirely the conceptions of David Gray’s own genius…. The series of sonnets entitled “In the Shadows”—written by the poet during his last illness—many of them bearing relation to his own condition, his own life, and his own prospects—appear to me to possess a solemn beauty not surpassed by many of the finest passages in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” totally distinct and unlike the “In Memoriam,” but as genuine, as sincere, as heart-stirring, and often as poetical.

	Tho’ the world could turn from you,
	This, at least, I learn from you:
	Beauty and Truth, though never found, are worthy to be sought,
	The singer, upward-springing,
	Is grander than his singing,
	And tranquil self-sufficing joy illumes the dark of thought.
	This, at least, you teach me,
	In a revelation:
	That gods will snatch, as worthy death, the soul in its aspiration.

  The touching story and writings of poor Gray—who lived just long enough to sing his own dirges, and died with all his music in him—reveal a sensitive temperament unsustained by co-ordinate power. Possibly we should more justly say that his powers were undeveloped, for I do not wholly agree with those who deny that he had genius, and who think his work devoid of true promise. The limitless conceit involved in his estimate of himself was only what is secretly cherished by many a bantling poet, who is not driven to confess it by the horror of impending death. His main performance, “The Luggie,” shows a poverty due to the want of proper literary models in his stinted cottage-home. It is an eighteenth-century poem, suggested by too close reading of Thomson and the like. Education, as compared with aspiration, comes slowly to low-born poets. The sonnets entitled “In the Shadows,” written during the gradual progress of Gray’s disease, are far more poetical, because a more genuine expression of feeling. They are indeed a painful study. Here is a subjective monody, uttered from the depths, but rounded off with that artistic instinct which haunts a poet to the last.

  “The Luggie,” with its sense of natural beauty, and its promise of didactic and descriptive power, constitutes Gray’s chief claim as a poet, but his sonnets are remarkable in substance, and several of them are felicitous in structure and expression.

  To gauge the potentialities of his genius is as impossible as it would be to describe the petals of an unopened bud. We can, however, see that the bud is itself a thing of beauty. With some cadences echoed from the poets whom he best loved, “The Luggie” has a music and a vision of its own; and those who read the noble sonnets written “in the twilight” may well lament the songs of the noontide which remain for ever unsung.

  His verse however is pleasant, and it might have acquired power. It retains a pathetic interest on account of the author’s fate.